Paul Ryan: ‘I Call This Getting Wienermobiled’

The congressman talks to Jim Rutenberg about summer jobs, the government shutdown and his next chapter.

Everybody thinks when politicians write books that it’s for a presidential race in the making. Is that why you wrote “The Way Forward”? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I never planned on running for Congress in the first place. I’m not one of these people who had my life mapped out in the second grade. I thought I was going to be a doctor.

Wouldn’t you have been chafing under Obamacare then? Yes, yes. That’s pretty good.

In the book, you reveal things that the public didn’t know, including your father’s struggle with alcoholism before his early death. Did you consider sharing that during the campaign? No, I didn’t. We discussed it in my family, but I quickly concluded this was not the time or the place. After I started writing this book, I decided to put that in there because if I didn’t, it would be like I whitewashed my history.

You also described the government shutdown as a suicide mission. Yeah. If the goal was to get rid of Obamacare, it wasn’t going to achieve that goal. Stopping discretionary spending does not stop entitlement spending. To suggest otherwise was not correct.

Do you think that the same players who called for the shutdown would push for it again now? No. I’d like to think you can learn some good lessons from these episodes.

Did Ted Cruz learn any lessons from it? You’d have to ask him. I don’t know.

You wrote that you drove the Wienermobile once. My aunt was a secretary at the Oscar Mayer headquarters in Madison and helped me get an internship there. I got to drive it once for a promotional event from one Cub Foods store to another. Somehow the story became that I was the Wienermobile driver, which is a whole summer job. I call this “getting Wienermobiled.”

Did that become a liability after Anthony Weiner’s Twitter scandal? Probably so.

If you run for president, whom would you rather run against, Hillary Rodham Clinton or Martin O’Malley of Maryland? How do you want me to answer that?

With candor and honesty. I don’t know. Whoever is easiest to beat.

Do you think it’s possible to have an honest, substantive debate in the current presidential election setting with the operatives and the money and the ads? I do, but you have to be really focused on cutting through the fog of presidential campaigns, the haze and the distractions.

Some people said that by adding you as his running mate, Mitt Romney was turningthe campaign into a debate about the role of government. Do you think it turned out that way? It is really hard to inject a new load of substance with 90 days to go. We closed the campaign the right way, but we had discussions about whether to make it a choice or a referendum. I long believed the way to go was to give people a really clear choice.

And was Romney resistant to the idea? No, he wasn’t. But conventional wisdom is that if an incumbent is not doing well, you make it a referendum on the incumbent.

I always understood you as being an Ayn Rand aficionado. But you distanced yourself from her writing during the campaign. What’s your real view of her? No, I wasn’t distancing. I adored her novels when I was young, and in many ways they gave me an interest in economics. But as a devout, practicing Catholic, I completely reject the philosophy of objectivism.

Rage Against the Machine has been described as one of your favorite bands. What did you think when the band’s guitarist Tom Morello said you were effectively the machine against which they were raging? They were never my favorite band. I hate the lyrics, but I like the sound. Led Zeppelin has always been my favorite band. Again, these urban legends get going.

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 12 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘I Call This Getting Wienermobiled’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe